Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The government ate my name

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 212 posts

Re: The government ate my name

#161

Post by madcaptenor »

DavidVoid wrote: post #36
xg15 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia) If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name. However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have r…

It's already eroded in many countries right? Gendered patronymic names used to be common here in Sweden - Katarina Gustavsdotter (Vasa) was the daughter of Gusav Eriksson (Vasa), who was the son of Erik Johansson (Vasa), &c. - but gendered patronymic names eventually became permanent last names that got inherited over multiple generations. So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last name Andersson, des…

English similarly has the name Anderson (and also Andrews).

Re: The government ate my name

#162

Post by mcdeltat »

I don't get why various governments/systems/etc have an obsession with the first name + last name format. It just has so many assumptions that fall over so quickly. Why can't we treat name as a single, generally opaque field and leave it at that? Exactly whose day is being ruined by not having a perfectly sanitised first name and last name?

Re: The government ate my name

#163

Post by throwaway2037 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #83
nneonneo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese people rarely change their surnames after marriage; kids usually inherit the father's surname and that's it. This has never caused any issues; systems I've interacted with have been totally OK with the idea that the parents can have different surnames from each other.

Chinese living in the west also will sometimes adopt a western name.

    > will sometimes adopt a western name
Do you mean first name or family name?

Re: The government ate my name

#164

Post by sotix »

cortesoft wrote: post #59
pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that mar…

> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change her name when she married me, I think this problem is overblown. I have yet to encount…

I'm not fully following. Are your last names extremely similar but different, and are you also maintaining citizenship in a foreign country that uses gendered last names? Because that's the crux of the issue. Otherwise it sounds like you might be discussing a tangentially related but different point.

I had a Greek friend born in America who was assigned her father's masculine gendered surname. Her birth was not registered in Greece. When she went to register in Greece as an adult, it created loads of issues due to her surname being incorrect from a Greek perspective. It required a lot of paperwork and fees be cause the Greek system was not set up at the time to handle that correctly.

On the flip side, her mother had a number of issues in the US having an almost identical yet different surname as her husband and daughter. Less extreme but frequently people would mess up the mom or the child's surname when entering records because they'd give the surnames a quick glance and incorrectly assume they were identical. She said there were often times where systems were designed with the faulty assumption that the child would have the same name as a parent.

Now, she effectively has two surnames depending on which passport she uses. Because it's easier for her to maintain names that correspond with the different systems.

Re: The government ate my name

#165

Post by pavel_lishin »

int_19h wrote: post #130
pavel_lishin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samesies; when I moved to Texas, people put the accent in my name on the wrong syllable, but after awhile that began to sound more natural than my name with the accent in the correct place but with an American accent. "PAYvel" sounds worse to me than "PahVEL", so I go by the latter - presumably fucking it up for every Pavel that comes into these people's lives after me.

I'm also Pavel, and it just seems to be one of those names that native English speakers have trouble with. Protip: it seems to help if you stick an accent on "a": "Pável". In US, people have usually seen enough Spanish to interpret this more or less correctly, and of course it also doubles as a stress marker. That said, personally, I often don't bother and also go with the default [ˈpei.vɪl] just because it's easier…

> it's easier to go with the flow.

Yep.

I've told people that my name has been mangled sufficiently, that when people discuss gravel, I snap my head in their direction.

Re: The government ate my name

#166

Post by pavel_lishin »

rkomorn wrote: post #62
pavel_lishin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samesies; when I moved to Texas, people put the accent in my name on the wrong syllable, but after awhile that began to sound more natural than my name with the accent in the correct place but with an American accent. "PAYvel" sounds worse to me than "PahVEL", so I go by the latter - presumably fucking it up for every Pavel that comes into these people's lives after me.

What gets me is the people who decide not to call me by the name I specifically introduce myself with. I have a nasal vowel in my name that, so far in my life, only French and Portuguese speakers have pronounced properly. I learned English in the US young enough that no one guesses I'm not native, and I anglicized my name so that it could be pronounced easily. It is what I go by. I introduce myself with this adopted…

Yeah. Every time someone asks me, "but how do you really pronounce it", I do a big internal sigh and resign myself to the next 10 minutes being a useless pronunciation lesson.

Re: The government ate my name

#167

Post by pavel_lishin »

dale_glass wrote: post #43
pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that mar…

This sometimes also causes problems for the authorities themselves for a change. I recall some TV program long ago mentioning the police had trouble with Russians because sometimes they think there's a whole gang and it's really just one guy whose name got corrupted in 5 different ways. Depending on the Russian name and the local language there can be many ways to screw things up. Like Elena might get written down as…

It's not even necessarily corruption; we address each other by different names depending on context.

To acquaintances, I might be a Pavel; to close friends, I might be Pasha. To my mom, I'm Pavlik. In a business or other more formal setting, I would be Pavel Dmitrievich.

I think it's a common complaint when reading Russian novels, non-Russians get confused about who's who because of these types of shifts. And it totally makes sense; at least my various nicknames start with the same letter, but many Russian "short" names don't particularly resemble the full name. Who would expect Aleksandr to be Sasha, if you didn't grow up in the culture?

Re: The government ate my name

#168

Post by tliltocatl »

bombcar wrote: post #67
jltsiren wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simpler than that. The Koine Greek transliteration became established long before that particular Jesus was born. It was a common name in a region that belonged to various Greek-speaking empires for centuries, at least nominally. The transliteration was based on the pronunciation used at the time, with a masculine suffix to make the name less awkward in Greek. And then people wrote the texts that would become th…

It’s also something uniquely modern that we consider a person to have “one true and real name” - something completely unheard of until quite recently.

> one true and real name

Egyptian mythology would like a word with you. Specially the part where Isis created a snake to bite Ra so that she could learn his true name. But yea, adapting names to foreign languages was a normal thing until recently.

Re: The government ate my name

#169

Post by deltarholamda »

thewebguyd wrote: post #34
kstrauser wrote: post #31

Just taking this opportunity to vent. When my wife and I married, she changed her name to [Her First Name] [Her Maiden Name] [My Last Name], like from First: Jane Middle: Ann Last: Smith to First: Jane Middle: Smith Last: Mylastname All was well and good until very recently when I was at the DMV with her and we were renewing her drivers license. We found out then that the person entering her name change form at the S…

> My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state. I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done. Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last n…

>Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name

I know this pain.

What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.

I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.

Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.

Re: The government ate my name

#170

Post by pavel_lishin »

hiatus wrote: post #65
watwut wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gendered name is grammatical construct, literally. But the strong "Elena Kuznetsov" cant exist rules are bad idea, because a.) foreigners exist b.) minorities exists c.) people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. They can exist, but sound weird in the language.

> people with strong opinions over how they want to be named exist. is a total non-issue. You can't, in any country I'm aware of, choose absolutely any name you want.

You sure can! But that doesn't mean it won't cause you problems.

For example, if you're male, and decide to change your name to Sarah, you totally can - but don't be surprised when people assume you're a woman.

And there are many countries, of which you are unaware, that do have pretty strict laws about what you are and aren't allowed to name your children. Iceland is the one that springs to mind off the top of my head. As I recall, Germany also has some limitations.

Post reply on HN